


Sum Tamquam Vas Perditum

by gardnerhill



Series: Wounded Warriors [1]
Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Community: watsons_woes, Friendship, Gen, Healing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-18
Updated: 2012-09-18
Packaged: 2017-11-14 12:25:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/515220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the LJ Comm Watson's Woes' Challenge 023. Prompt: "Adventure of the Crooked Man: Watson is affected far more deeply than Holmes can understand. After much time, Watson reveals that he was held hostage at some point and tortured."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sum Tamquam Vas Perditum

"I was tortured and tried to get away, and was captured and tortured again. You can see for yourselves the state in which I was left."

My pencil-hand faltered on the notebook. I stared at Henry Wood as he matter-of-factly related the horror of his captivity in India – at the man's bent back and lined face, the grey hair and yellowed eyes – and my pity and horror at his appearance was swept away as if in a whirlwind, my heart and stomach in turmoil and my brain feeling as hot as if I had a fever. The past rose up in a pillar of sun-hot dust and swallowed me.

I stared not into Henry Wood's sunburnt, pain-etched face, but into a looking-glass. 

I am alive, I am home, it is over.

Henry Wood spoke of his years as an abused captive, and then as a slave of the rebels; I started, and returned to my note-taking. Wood's mongoose provided a welcome distraction for a good long moment, which allowed me to recover my composure with but a momentary hitch. 

The rest of Wood's story was easily told, all the details of which meshed perfectly with my friend's deductions and proved the truth of his words to my mind. Woods was exonerated of having any willful part in James Barclay's death, and Holmes reassured him that he need only come forward if Mrs. Nancy Barclay were still to lie under suspicion once she awoke from her brain-fever. I must confess that after hearing of the late Colonel's successful plot to condemn his messmate to a lifetime of captivity and pain simply to rid himself of a romantic rival, I found myself not at all sorry for his fate, nor for the 30 years of guilt that kept him from knowing a moment of peace in his life afterward, before his fatal apoplectic fit; the man's own guilty conscience and false heart had surely punished him a hundredfold over what retribution he would have received from a military trial, imprisonment and possible execution for his deeds. 

We left Wood in his room alone, huddling close to the fire as if seeking again that blistering sun in the land of his imprisonment – as if even though he'd come home to die on English soil his skin yet yearned for the tropical heat. I opened my mouth as if to say something, but my tongue lay like lead in my mouth. I turned away and followed Holmes out of the room. 

We were both much cheered after our brief talk with Major Murphy outside; our concern about the fate of an innocent woman was alleviated with the inquest's conclusion that apoplexy and not murder had felled Col. Barclay. Holmes was in a blithe mood after he revealed the last piece of the puzzle to me, on our way back to the Aldershot train station. 

"You have seemed in better spirits the last day or so, Watson," Holmes said jocularly. "I have no doubt that you must have felt a sense of homecoming to see the Queen's finest in all their regimental array."

I returned to the present. "It has been good to get out and see soldiers again." 

"You share my sorrow for the evils of the world, however," Sherlock Holmes added. "I must confess that Henry Wood's fate weighs upon me as well."

I was relieved; he had taken my reaction for moroseness at the unhappy man's story. He did not know. He could not know, he must never know.

It was only my imagination that my leg ached; I strode firmly on my sound feet, frowning. 

I am alive, I am home, it is over.

*** 

Our work went on. I wrote up the case and sent it off to the Strand. Holmes continued to take cases and to ask for my assistance. I tended my patients and accompanied Holmes whenever I could spare the time. 

My leg did not pain me any more than its usual wont. My feet were undamaged. September remained September. And yet too often at night I returned to the July heat and the dusty hills of Candahar, and the soft courteous voice and the rod. My litany (I am alive, I am home, it is over) worked sometimes, and too often it was mere hot wind blowing the dust around my head, another mocking sound. 

What was the point of all of it? I mused unhappily one blazing hot day in late September. What good had I done, what purpose had I served? My hand stole toward my leg. To what good end had any of it happened?

"You are right, Watson," Holmes said as smoothly as if I'd been speaking to him aloud. "It does seem a most preposterous way of settling a dispute."

"Most preposterous!" I blurted out in startlement, and then froze in horror as I realised that he had responded to my exact string of thoughts as if he'd read them himself. He knew, he knew of me, he'd – I stammered something, and nearly collapsed in relief to hear him draw out a line of reasoning that paralleled my state of mind for a good long stretch, but fortunately veered away from the correct cause of my unhappy musings.

When he asked me to accompany him to investigate what seemed a mere gruesome medical-student prank I leaped at the occupation this case promised. Sadly, this proved to be a grave error on my part. An unhappy marriage, a faithless wife, three sisters that were now two, and a man whose jealous rage and love destroyed three people; "The Cardboard Box" was one of the unhappiest cases I ever recorded for my friend. Holmes was in a morose mood as we left Croyden, and I in a likeminded gloom. That night I had no comforting answer to my friend's plaintive "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear?"

I retired for the night, and descended into Maiwand forthwith – dreams more vivid and clear than I'd had for many a year, and that started me awake with eyes full of tears. _Coward_ , I whispered to myself. _Cry like a babe at MacLaine's grave, or Henn's, and tell them your woes_. 

I was alive, as so many were not. I was in London, home once again. It was over. It had to be over. It must be over.

For if I did not soon take that to heart and believe it, my worst fear would be realised: Holmes would discover this about me, as he had learned so much at our first meeting. He had come close, that hot afternoon. If he learned the truth, he would know the kind of man I had been when the proof had been demanded of me; his respect for me would surely die that day. I could not bear to suffer his tolerance of my presence after that. I would leave Baker Street before I could see the fond regard in those grey eyes turn to scorn, and whatever life I led after that would be a stale affair flavoured only with my dreadful dreams. 

_I am alive_ , I whispered between my teeth, eyes squeezed shut. _I am home. It is over._

*** 

The following weeks continued in the same leitmotif – terror and despair in my nights, resolution during the days. Re-reading my work in the magazine, it struck me that I had now been infected by the melancholia that had devoured Col. Barclay's soul. Now I too felt unable to smile for days on end, sunk into a study that grew browner by the day, and a growing dread of the moment I retired to my room for the evening, for I would be alone in the dark for the nearly-inevitable midnight awakening in a cold sweat. I feared to go back to sleep and was even more afraid for the day that Holmes would learn all at last. 

I was no fool. I knew my friend's matchless gift would enable him to see the truth in the end. I would have had him learn later rather than sooner, but a cabman's clumsy nag put paid to that thought.

We were returning from Scotland Yard to Baker Street in a wretched downpour one afternoon. Whilst alighting from the cab before Holmes I stepped to the cobbles just as a motorcar rattled past. The horse whinnied and shied in its traces and backed furiously, nearly pitching Holmes onto his face even as he left the hansom; I turned to steady him, and at that precise moment the horse trod fully upon my left foot. 

And at that moment I was back in Maiwand. 

I screamed like the horse itself. 

Chaos ruled around me – Holmes shouting, the cabman, the horse, the bystanders – and to me it was all distant window dressing. The rainy London day was gone; July heat beat upon my naked skin, and the soft courteous voice asking questions beat upon my ears. All I could do was scream my pain to the valley, and answer the voice the only way I knew how. 

_ I am a doctor. I don't know. I don't know, I am a doctor. I am a doctor! _

_The knife wound suppurated; I would lose the leg if it remained untreated. That was a hundred miles from my reckoning at that moment, for I was suspended by my ankles from the tree, my arms bound behind my back and my head mere inches from the dust. I lived my life from second to second – and minute to minute when I felt stronger._

_"Where will they move next?" the Ghazi lieutenant asked, his accented English perfect and his voice soft and courteous. Another man beside him said nothing; he only held the rod._

_I had nothing to tell them, I was a doctor with the Fusiliers, I had only just joined the fighting, I knew nothing. I was a soldier of the Queen, and now I was a captive of one of the Ghazis, no doubt a relative of Ayub Khan who now had MacLaine. Oh God I would die in this terrible place, alone, unwept, unburied._ I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind _._

_Again I gasped the words, but as steely as I could – I would not plead for mercy. "I am a doctor. I don't know."_

_And down came the rod across both the soles of my naked feet, and the entire valley heard me._

_"Your company,_ DaakTar _Watson. Surely your messmates talked whilst you bound their wounds? Your commander? Men tell things to their doctors, important things. Destinations. Positions. Where you will need to move. Tell me, and we stop. Stay silent and the hyaenas will play with your corpse."_

_I could not see; tears of pain blurred my eyes as they ran up my forehead and into my hair. "I don't know," I whispered. And once again pain exploded across my feet._

_One sane, comforting thought stayed in my mind through the blanket of pain and my screaming: I will lose my leg – and that will be one less foot they can hurt_.

I was lifted by two men, one of them with a strong horsey smell. My foot throbbed with agony. It was the tree again.  
Into the dark and up, a jolting sidelong lift. Soon, the tree. I knew nothing, could tell them nothing, would not betray the men still living who'd retreated. 

I sat in a soft chair that was familiar to me. Another explosion of pain from my foot. _I don't know. I don't know!_ Oh; they were removing my shoe and sock. 

My hurt foot rested on a hassock. The room was familiar; every smell spoke of home. Was I dreaming again? I'd had such a lovely dream – I had been home in London, and had met a remarkable man who shared rooms with me and who'd opened my eyes to the world around me – but I was awake again, my hurt foot was the proof, and I was alone among my enemies. 

The tall figure before me, also familiar. His voice was as genteel and refined as my questioner, and it sounded like home. It was the remarkable man from my London dream. "A doctor is coming to tend your foot, my boy." 

Lies. No, treating me with false kindness would get no more intelligence from me than the tree and the rod – a man who knew nothing could say nothing. All I could do was repeat the phrase, even though they would not believe me, while tears of pain blinded me. " _Zə DaakTar yəm. Nə yəm khabar. Nə yəm khabar!_ "

A long pause. When the man spoke again his voice was level and cool as before, but it carried a thread of something like the wavering warmth of an English spring day. 

"You have been screaming this phrase since taking your injury. My dear fellow, please accept my apologies for not realising how affected you were by Henry Wood's testimony, and why. It is now clear that in Afghanistan you too survived the ordeal of captivity and torture – and your captors employed the technique of _falaqa_ upon you."

But we were in Afghanistan, were we not? Or was…my heart lifted…was Afghanistan the dream, and London and the remarkable man the reality? Or had my London man been taken captive as well?

I closed my eyes hard, resolute. I dared not hope. "I can tell them nothing. _Zə DaakTar yəm. Nə yəm khabar._ "

"I believe you." The Englishman's voice bore an undercurrent of sorrow and affection I could not deny. "You have been in enemy hands long enough, Watson. Soon you will know yourself to be safe and among friends once again, and that you are home." 

Horror gripped my insides. Rescue was coming? Then I was dead. "Tell –" I choked. Tell whom? Who was there to tell? "Tell my orderly, William Murray, that he is not to blame for my captivity." We'd been cut off from each other by the advancing Ghazis, Murray swept up in the retreat, and one of the foemen had brought me down by driving his dirk into my thigh to the hilt. Despite that my leg did not hurt as much as it ought. Had gangrene set in already?

"You may tell him yourself."

He didn't know. "No," I said, and shameful tears of fear flooded my eyes. "No, they will wait until I hear our bugles, and then they will cut my throat, the way they did to poor MacLaine in Ayub Khan's tent. I am lost. Go; my leg is wounded, and they have been beating my feet. I can't run. Save yourself."

A long pause. I did not open my eyes, and could see little with them open for the pain. Had my kind English friend fled? 

"Doctor." The voice was level, but no longer cool. It was only warmth, and I clung to it. "I will see you safe and at peace in London once again. A doctor is coming now to tend to your foot. I will also bring someone who can speak to the very source of your pain. Do not fear; I will not leave you."

I tried to think past my pain and fear and grief, and in so doing it was as if I awakened gradually from a nightmare. I heard only the comforting sounds of a room; a ticking clock, the distant noise of a busy city street, the sloughing sounds of feet over carpeting. The weather was cool and damp, not hot and dry. The room was no tent interior. My foot hurt; it was no dream. 

I was home, in London. I was alive. My ordeal was over. 

And the tall man with the voice like a blanket on a winter night was still there, the man who was my remarkable friend – the man who was Sherlock Holmes. He knew, now, what had happened. But there was only a quiet sorrow in his eyes, not disdain. 

This brought no comfort to me. Holmes only thought that he knew all. 

Lost in my miserable thoughts as I gradually returned to the here and now, I watched Holmes write something and call for the page. Not long afterward a doctor did appear – none other than my neighbor Anstruther, with whom I kept a cheery façade whilst he looked at my foot. 

"Nothing broken, Watson." Anstruther patted my shoulder. "There's a good deal of soft-tissue swelling and bruising – a good application of ice should take care of the problem. You won't need laudanum for this pain? Very well, then. Keep the foot elevated and don't play detective for the next week or two, and you'll be good as new."

I nodded and managed a smile for him as he left. 

Mrs. Hudson sent Billy up with a scuttle of chipped ice, which was soon wrapped in a cloth and packed around my foot. I looked around me at the room, both to reassure me that I was in the here and now, and to memorise the sight against the day I might find it necessary to decamp when I could walk once more. Holmes had remained in his own chair, fingers steepled and decently looking into the small fire rather than at me during my treatment. But he had not left me; he'd kept his promise.

The afternoon passed in this silent fashion. Mrs. Hudson brought up supper and helped arrange the hassock so that I could keep my foot up whilst I dined at our table. My pain and remembered terror had taken much out of me, and I devoured the food on my plate. 

"I will take your room tonight, Watson," Holmes said, his voice as blessedly cool and pragmatic as before, "and you mine. For a few days, at least, the one flight of stairs ought to be all you negotiate."

"I'd appreciate that, old man," I replied to my glass of port. I had trouble meeting his eyes. 

"Do not fear, my dear fellow," he said with his particular warmth, and as gently as he would speak to soothe a distraught client. "I will never ask you another word about this, unless you wish to do so. Know this also, Watson: Nothing I have seen and heard today diminishes my regard for you, as my colleague and as my friend."

I nodded. I wanted so to believe it, and I knew he believed it. But I knew differently. 

I was able to manage the basics of bathing and preparation for bed on my own, and repacked the ice-bag around my foot as I got into Holmes' bed, grimly prepared to descend into my personal hell once more. Yet, as I settled my head into a pillow that smelt of my friend, I did not feel my usual fear of sleep this time.

*** 

_"Where are they,_ DaakTar _Watson?"_

_I hung on my gibbet, a captive as before, helpless._

_But Holmes was near; I could not see him, but I smelt him. He knew where I was, and would soon come to my aid. Despair left me, and I calmly endured my captors' brutal attentions, awaiting my friend._

*** 

I awoke refreshed and at peace, as I had not done for a long time. For the first time in as long, I began to hope that I would reconcile my spirit to my reawakened memories. 

But as I donned my dressing gown for breakfast, gingerly keeping off my swollen foot, memory returned. My spirits sank once again. I would not have Sherlock Holmes' pity, nor his friendship under a false assumption. I must soon tell all and bare my breast. I would wait until my foot was better, for then I could move out of Baker Street if need be. How could he not learn all and then despise me for my weakness?

Holmes was not at the breakfast table when I hobbled into the room (the ice-scuttle conveniently located near my place). But his seat was occupied nonetheless. The man wore an oversized and threadbare jacket over a clean but also oversized shirt. His body was as bent as I remembered, his face as lined, his hair and whiskers as grey. His voice carried the same rasp. His mongoose rustled and thumped in his cage by his feet.

"Good morning, Doctor Watson," said Henry Wood. 

For a moment my vision greyed with pain past and present, and horror; I sat down rapidly lest I faint. 

"Mr. Holmes asked me to come here at once," Henry Wood said as if it was the most casual conversation in the world. "He's given me the run of the place and made himself scarce. I thought I detected a soldier in you when we were introduced – and one that's seen enough of his own ugliness at enemy hands. I saw the way you shook, writing down what I said. I did wonder at that."

I sat and listened, taking deep breaths to steady my nerves. The note Holmes wrote yesterday – obviously a telegram Billy was to send to Aldershot. Holmes' comment about finding someone to treat the source of my pain now made sense. If anyone understood what I had endured, it would be… I shook my head angrily. My little interrogation, against Henry Wood's years of captivity and abuse? Holmes might as well have brought in the victim of a bear-mauling to commiserate over my cut finger.

"Wise man, your friend," the old soldier continued on as if heedless of my agitated state. "Only someone that's lived it knows what it's like. We can talk like messmates." 

All I could do was shake my head over and over. "No. No. No. I can't. It's over. I'm alive. I can't."

Henry Wood drank his tea. "Doctor, would you say that to a man with a great nasty boil paining him? Tell him 'no point in me doing anything, be glad you're still alive' and walk away to let it heal or not on its own? Or do you make one deep painful stab and clear out that filth before it poisons him? 

"I lived that way for thirty years, with my pain and bitterness like a canker in my heart, and it's only now that some peace is coming back to me. That foul snake's death was the least part of it – it was talking to my Nancy, and to the pair of you, the first time I'd done so since it all started, that began the work. Nancy's a good deal better, and we've been talking nonstop for weeks. Hurt like hell at first, for both of us. But we're all of us soldiers – we know how to live with pain, don't we?"

"How can you bear to be in the same room with me?" I blurted out, and clenched my fist on the table. My foot throbbed angrily in agreement. "It…it was only a day or two. Three, possibly. It was nothing, nothing to what you endured."

But instead of staring at me with the disdain I feared to find in Holmes' eyes, Henry Wood only nodded. "Looking from the outside, three days. From the inside, forever in Hell. Knowing you'll die and never see a friendly face. Wishing you had something you could tell them so they'll stop, just stop, even if it's to kill you at last. And at the end, crying and shouting for your mummy like a lost child."

I cried out in pain, as if he'd struck my feet. He might as well have watched me the whole time and witnessed my shame and cowardice, everything I was terrified to admit. I was naked before him. All I could do was weep. 

The crooked man pulled a clean handkerchief from his sleeve and handed it over; ashamed yet grateful, I put it to good use. The pain was that of a lancet; I had revealed all at last, and it was not to Holmes.

"As I did," Henry Wood said. "Night after night. The same night, a hundred times. The same night you had, three times. Except, thank God, you were rescued."

"Rebels," I gasped. "Fought each other, just as my orderly came back for me with a handful of men. They all shot at us as we fled. Killed two of my rescuers – Harrison, Jacobs." I looked down at my shoulder. "They hit me with one shot, broke the bone and grazed the artery. I almost died, from that and my leg." Murray himself had cut out the festering flesh in my leg and sewn my arm together even as we ran for our lives, leaving behind two brave men to feed the vultures. "I should have died from my wounds." 

"You have days when you wish you did," Henry Wood said, helping himself to the ham and eggs in the covered dish. We could have been chatting about a dull watch-duty over beers in the mess-hall. "I remember those. Gave it up as a futile thing."

"Yes." I straightened, and found a steaming cup of tea awaiting me, strong and black. "I did at first. Now, only now and again, when it…gets a bit much. When I wonder if my one life was worth two of theirs, when I remembered how I…I was."

"Well, Dr. Watson, let an old soldier tell you a secret." Wood leaned over, his seamed brown face like a walnut and his eyes sharp and bright. "There are men who can endure the worst tortures ever devised by miserable humanity, without screaming or confessing or breaking down and looking like sniveling cowards to a fellow who never gets closer to combat than reading it in the paper from his armchair, snug and safe at home."

Those bright eyes transfixed me like a cobra hypnotizing its prey. "And every single damn' one of them is in a story book, or a fairy tale. None of us – not the bravest sod who ever lived, not the strongest will – can withstand torture. None. Once I figured that out, I stopped despising myself for crying and screaming like a bag of cats, and knew that all I had to do was live through this night, every night. The way you did."

I gasped and sat back, blood pounding in my ears and feeling as if I truly would faint. The thought that I was absolved of cowardice and weakness, by this most able of confessors, was like a new cog in a factory machine, and all the dark thoughts that had been grinding through my brain since Aldershot (and in bad moments for longer than that) were flung out of synchronization all in one movement. If Henry Wood saw the change in me he said nothing about it. 

"I will say one thing about being back in England," he said instead, and drained his teacup. "One does miss a good curry."

I responded, grateful to have an innocuous subject for discussion whilst my mind tumbled and rolled like a jumping-jack over this new thought. I reminisced about the odd but delicious yoghurt-drenched dumplings served in Candahar taverns. From there the topic naturally went to the difficulty of finding beer in a Mohammedan country, and then the heat and the dust in Afghanistan versus that in India, and the stupid incompetent officers who'd bought their positions or who'd wanted an adventure, and the solid career men we would have followed into Hell, and the loneliness and the illness, and the flies and the women and the barracks songs and the peaceful Sundays and the terror-filled moments in the heart of battle – in short, we were two old soldiers together. It pleased me no end to see Henry Wood act lighter-hearted during our talk, even to the point of laughing over one of my stories, and that I was giving him something in return for the hope of peace he had given me like a rope lowered into a pit. Wood opened Teddy's cage and let the mongoose slither up my body like a furry serpent, where the little beast proceeded to devour my breakfast (I'd had no stomach for anything but the tea) whilst I scratched his back.

Not until early afternoon did I think to look at the time, and wondered how short it had been. Hope now lived again inside me, confronting the shame, and every breath was easier to draw than the last. My face ached; it had been so long since I'd smiled or laughed. 

At last Henry Wood put out his cigarette, shooed Teddy back into his cage, stood and gathered up his stick, announcing that he had a long journey back to Aldershot. "Tell you, Dr. Watson. You come round to Hudson Street one of these Sundays after your foot's better, and we'll go to the soldiers' pub and spend the day – show those little brats how to drink and throw darts. Oh, I haven't laughed so in I don't know how long. Looking forward to it!" 

I shed my ice-bag to hobblingly escort him to the top of the stairs. Before Wood left, he turned back to look me in the eye.

"You say it's only now and again, Watson?" The crooked man's bristly moustaches turned up a little even though his eyes were sad. "Just you remember this, the next time you're ready to put yourself in Hollow Square and wonder if you even deserve to be alive. That smart chap, who saved my dear Nancy from unjust imprisonment if not execution, has a very different opinion on that subject."

*** 

Holmes returned from the day he'd spent at Scotland Yard ("Their filing system is a crime in itself, Watson"; I pointedly did not look at his wild hodgepodge of papers everywhere in the study), and we dined together as we had so many times before (the only difference once again being my propped and iced foot). 

"You will have to amuse yourself Sunday after next," I said. 

"No doubt the beer served to young recruits is no match for your club's offerings," Holmes returned serenely. "Still, it is easier for you to see Mr. Wood than the reverse."

For Wood, a penniless performer, trains and cabs and a day away from his livelihood were out of consideration; not unless he had been generously reimbursed by his patron. 

"It's also easier for two old wolves to lick each other's wounds than to reach their own." I set my fork down. "My dear fellow, you have eased the pain of two people with this scheme of yours, and not merely my own. Those who think you are all intellect and little heart are fools and blind into the bargain."

Holmes seemed very intent on retrieving a wayward pea on his plate; but the little smile playing at the corner of his mouth told the truth of his state. 

I thought of the pillow that had guarded my dreams the night before with his scent – even when he did not intend to do so, he gave me much. I would prove I was worthy of his gifts. 

"I will tell you of my time in Maiwand, Holmes. All of it." I kept my head up and my eyes fixed on his. "It is ugly, and there is nothing heroic in the telling, and it does not paint me in a good light. But you deserve the truth." 

"I am fully aware of the truth, my dear Watson." Holmes held his wineglass a little more firmly than was his wont. His level grey eyes stayed upon me with the same look, the one I would have died rather than ever lose. "That in finding you, I became the luckiest man in all of England."

I grinned to the very edges of my moustaches and touched the lip of my glass to his. I did not repeat his phrase back, for I knew he knew what I was about to say. I inhaled the rich red wine and took another bite of Mrs Hudson's kidney pie. 

I was alive. I was home. It was over.


End file.
